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September 13, 2006
A super-entertaining read
The story of how America went restaurant and gourmet food crazy over the past 40 years is told with great page-turning style by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp in his wonderful new book “The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation� (Broadway Books).
“The United States of Arugula� shows us how a few key figures such as cookbook authors James Beard and Julia Child and restaurant innovators like Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters changed the whole American food landscape.
Kamp points out in his introduction that food is now “a cultural pastime, something you can follow the way you follow sports or the movies…the food world has its own ESPN (the Food Network, founded in 1993), its own constellation of marketable stars (Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, etc.)… its own literary lights (Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain)…You can be a non-cook and still be a food obsessive, attending new restaurant openings like a theatergoer, religiously consulting the Zagat guides (launched in 1979) and ordering the finest prepared foods from Whole Foods, Dean & DeLuca, or Williams-Sonoma.�
Clearly, we were long overdue for a book explaining how this all came to pass in a country where TV dinners and Howard Johnson galvanzied the populace only 50 years ago.
Kamp’s book details the huge changes in home cooking brought about by the star food writers (Child et al) and the introduction of devices such as the Cuisinart food processor (created 30 years ago by the Connecticut inventor Carl Sontheimer). The rising interest in food led to greater expectations from restaurant dining as well as the availability of better ingredients from grocers.
Kamp is a great storyteller who starts with the arrival of French chefs for the 1939 New York Worlds Fair — who were soon to establish most of the chic Manhattan restaurants of the 1940s and ’50s — and then leads us through all of the great restaurant trends and introduces us to most of the major players who made us into a nation of food lovers.
The book reminds us that such contemporary home and restaurant staples as salsa, sushi and — yes — arugula were considered revolutionary innovations only a few decades ago.
“The United States of Arugula� is so well written that you don’t really have to be a foodie to enjoy it: Kamp makes a strong case that the story he tells is as important as the rest of the cultural history of the past half-century.
Posted by Joe on September 13, 2006 5:55 PM
